Are Irish voters biased against female candidates? Evidence from the 2020 general election

ABSTRACT

Ireland is the first country in the world to apply a legislative gender quota under an STV electoral system. Since 2016, the quota has required parties to ensure that at least thirty percent of their candidates running in the general election are women. Due to the nature of the electoral system, namely that it is candidate-centred, the impact of the quota has the potential to be limited if voter bias is present among the electorate. While the initial gains from the quota’s first election in 2016 were maintained at the 2020 general election, with one more woman elected to Dáil Éireann, the headline figures may be misleading. In this earthquake election, a significant number of high-profile women from across the political spectrum lost their seats, while male colleagues retained theirs, suggesting that female candidates may have been evaluated differently from their male counterparts. Using self-reported voter attitudes from the 2020 Irish National Election Study, we investigate whether there is an underlying bias against women amongst voters. We test whether such a bias has an impact on the share of women running and the share of women winning, as well as individual women’s level of electoral success. Overall, we find no evidence that voter bias affected outcomes for women at the 2020 Irish general election.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• voter bias
• voter behaviour
• candidate selection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes

1 https://data.ipu.org/women-averages?month=10&year=2020 [accessed 11 April 2021]

2 https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/gender-quotas/database [accessed 12 April 2021]

3 It should be noted that the quota legislation is written in gender neutral terms. Although in practice the quota has benefitted women, this is only due to their substantial underrepresentation in the Irish political space. Political parties in receipt of state funding that failed to field enough men to make up a minimum of 30 percent of their candidates would also be subject to the penalty (i.e. the loss of half their state funding for the full parliamentary term) applied to parties that do not meet the quota.

4 It is worth noting also that even these such interventions fail to make the supply and demand distinction as clearly as we might expect. While a candidate gender quota exists to increase the supply of women candidates, it does so by identifying political parties as a barrier to women’s entry into political life. A quota makes space for women among party candidates, but it does so because parties typically have not been selecting a diverse slate of candidates (i.e. there has been a lack of demand for women among selectors). Ireland’s Electoral (Amendment) (Political Funding) Act 2012 makes this explicit in the punitive measure it sets out to be applied to political parties in the event of their non-compliance. And party that fails to achieve the thirty percent gender quota will lose half of its state funding for the full parliamentary term.

5 The state is ranked third out of 166 countries by the UN Gender Development Index 2019 (GDI).

6 The number of first preference votes received varies according to the size of the electorate, therefore we have used the share of the quota received (i.e. the minimum number of votes a candidate must win in order to be deemed elected) to ensure comparability across candidates.

7 The appendix reports these scores for each constituency.

8 Fine Gael serves as the reference category against which each of the party coefficients should be judged.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Keenan

Lisa Keenan lectures in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. She researches on Irish politics and gender and politics.

Mary Brennan

Mary Brennan holds a PhD in Political Science from University College Dublin, where she has previously lectured on comparative politics. She researches and publishes on gender and Irish politics.